Bloodbent
by Cattastrophie
Summary: The Moon was merciless, but her cruelty delivered was slow and soft. A recount as told by the secondlast water bender of the Southern Tribe. Warning: contains spoilers for episode 8 of Book 3


**A/N: **A spoiler warning for those who have not yet watched up till Episode 8 of Book 3: The Puppet Master. Also, credit and much love goes to the excellent Catchline who was my beta!

**Bloodbent**

Monsters were not born; they were in fact made. It was a thought she clung to single-mindedly when both consciousness and sanity were slipping gently from broken fingers and torn skin, long after her comrades had started laughing wildly at air, or were dragged to the burning embrace of death.

She was a daughter of the water tribe; what her people bended was fluid, life-giving and as clear and pure as the soul of the Moon herself. What she came to realize with staggering clarity when the other world had began whispering her name, was that the Moon's gift had been greater and more terrible than her people had ever known, or cared to know.

Water was oxygen and hydrogen. Air was water evaporated; ice was water solidified. Plants and the earth that bore them were but storage places for water. Blood was thicker than water, yes, but blood was made with water nonetheless, and as she knelt, strung by cast-iron manacles whose keys the guards had melted in front of her, the realization allowed her to curl her lips back and bare her teeth, slow tears drying from the heat even before they could fall to the harsh stone below her knees.

Flies and unwary arachnids were her first, meager sacrifices, then lizards, and rats. She practiced, cloaked behind discreet movement and a vacant smile, extending the Moon's gift-curse over the pure, untainted liquid compressed within the animals' veins. She practiced until the rats would twist their own bodies to her bidding, or sink their teeth deep into each others' throat to her satisfaction, until miniscule veins ruptured from the force of liquid pulsing within, and blood jetted from their insignificant carcasses to coat her dark hair, lips and dress, indistinguishable from her own.

She lifted her head with tremendous effort one airless night, and prayed blindly to the Moon beyond thick metal and scorching flames which held her. It was not courage or sanity she asked for, nor penance for her would-be sin of enslaving another human with the element of her birthright. She begged instead for strength, and the only remorse she felt was for the heedless animals she had blood-bent to hideous, undignified deaths.

She escaped the following night, leaving behind the mangled bodies of her brother and sister warriors to smoulder and rot, killing one guard and the remnants of her conscience.

The moon waxed and waned till she had lost the desire to count, before she met another bender from the Water Tribe, one who, with naïve eyes, girlish fingers and unearthly bending unlocked the guilt, grief and rage dormant in her wasted heart. A wild hope burned insistently that her gift-curse would be passed on, used to silence those whose kinsmen had murdered and shamed her people, who chained and caged her in a dank stone chamber for ten years while name, age and soul burnt slowly to nothingness.

As she drew water and erased life in a perfect circle from the field of carnations as she faced the girl, however, she knew with restored, aching clarity that her dream would not be fulfilled. The girl- Katara, she was called- had too much compassion within her, and she had too little to afford. Then the girl made hope flare again, brighter than the silver glow of a full moon, when she applied all that she was taught and more, unto herself.

The feral joy which filled her then was almost unfamiliar, so unpracticed at feeling it was she. Then for the few, suffocating seconds when her will crumbled against the girl's bending she was reacquainted with the helpless, all-consuming forty-year-old terror which had flooded her veins when she had been taken captive by the Fire Nation.

_So this is what the guard felt like_. Her aged knees, locked and stiffened against her own will, struggled to give way.

Her eyes were unseeing when the villagers dragged her, unresisting, beyond the forest and away from the girl and her companions.

_Once more_. A stone chamber, the village's most secure refuge-turned-prison. The air, thick with dust. Dark, cold metal, the moon locked away from her.

When at least she had been left alone she allowed herself silent tears. They fell, unhesitating, onto the ground and lay passive, waiting for usage or for the air to claim them. She lifted her head towards what she imagined was the direction of the moon, swept up the moisture of her tears with her long mane of silver hair, before coiling the heavy, wet strands slowly round her throat. Her eyes fell gently shut as she began.

Hence passed the second-last warrior-bender of the Southern water tribe.


End file.
